Congratulations. You’ve just built a new deck in your backyard. The wood is firm underneath your feet and you are looking forward to many relaxing hours spent on your new deck enjoying the fresh air and sunshine.
Unfortunately for you, you’ve built your deck in a hostile environment. From the moment you’ve driven the last nail hostile forces will relentlessly assault your deck until the wood becomes so rotted that it will no longer support the weight of your body. The only way to save your deck is through constant vigilance. You need to paint some sort of a waterproof barrier over the wood and you need to renew that waterproofing on a regular basis.
Our ability to hold on to God’s truth is a lot like that deck. The deck is assaulted by rain, dew, snow, and sleet. The world around us assaults God’s truth with a constant drizzle of contrary ideas. If we let these ideas through they begin to rot the truth within us. This doesn’t result in the immediate destruction of the idea; like a piece of wood exposed to the elements the rot can make quite a bit of progress before it is noticeable.
I wonder if there is any plank in the deck of God’s truth that has experienced as much rot as the idea of the lordship of Jesus Christ. To give just one example, if you examine the statistics for divorce and adultery you find virtually no difference between evangelical Christians and non-Christians in our culture. The only possible explanation for this is that Christians have allowed themselves to be so influenced by the culture that they have allowed commandments to somehow be moved into the category of suggestions.
One of the main satanic strategies in the spiritual war being waged against our culture is to create the idea that there is no such thing as absolute truth. And if there is no such thing as absolute truth there can be no absolute standards, no one can ever judge anyone else’s conduct, and ultimately, there can be no commandments, only suggestions. There are two things you can do to protect your own soul from this assault. The first is to limit the amount of time you spend being exposed to worldly culture (this includes books, movies, radio, TV, and the internet). The second is to expand the amount of time you spend in the Christian disciplines of Bible reading, prayer, the reading of Christian books, the reading of Brother Mark’s Spiritual Diary, and meeting with other Christians for joint edification.
In an effort to protect us from the influence of the world and to renew our minds to the truth of the lordship of Christ, I am paraphrasing lord as “the One-who-must-be-obeyed-in-all-things” in my expanded paraphrase.
As a church, if we want to cure the rot in the church and begin to influence the world once again, we are going to have to return to the preaching of hellfire and damnation. We are going to have to preach in such a way that a sinner listening to the sermon can actually visualize himself standing in front of the throne of God, hearing the sentence of doom being pronounced upon him, and actually be able to feel the angelic beings grab him and drag him to the edge of the cliff from which he will be thrown into the lake of fire. If you find this kind of preaching repellent, if the very idea offends you, it’s just another indication of the drizzle of worldly thinking rotting the wood of God’s truth in your brain.
Guess which Biblical figure had to most to say about hell, and used the most graphic language in describing the sufferings of hell? One of those fiery Old Testament prophets, right? Wrong. The most graphic, horrifying warnings about hell come from the lips of the lamb of God, Jesus Christ. (Matthew 5:21-10; 10:28; 22:33. Mark 9:42-48, and please note that while verses 44 and 46 may not have been in the original manuscripts, verse 48 most certainly was!) Not only did Christ have quite a bit to say about hell, He told us exactly how the Holy Spirit would bring a person to salvation under most circumstances. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. (John 16:7-11)
I’d like to close with a personal challenge. Many years ago, as I was praying for people in Muslim countries who have no opportunity to hear the gospel, I found myself praying that God would appear to them in dreams and visions and tell them the truth. Months later I began to hear stories of Christian agencies being contacted by people living in Muslim countries who had experienced dreams and visions of a man telling them about Jesus Christ. They were contacting the Christian agencies to ask for more information about Jesus. This process continues to this day. Obviously the Holy Spirit had influenced me to pray this way and no, I don’t think all this happened just because of my prayers. I’m sure there were many others.
Recently I’ve had a sense that I need to start praying that people in our culture will start to react to the deaths of friends and loved ones by becoming obsessively concerned about their own eternal destiny. That the thought would come to them that they need to find out for sure, beyond any shadow of a doubt, what they need to do to make heaven and miss hell. And that this concern would be so strong that they would seek out advice from other people until they meet a Christian who can tell them how to be saved.
In addition to praying that prayer for the general population, I have felt led to pray that judges and lawyers would start having vivid dreams of their own damnation, so that they would actually wake up screaming as they begin to fall into the flames after the angels hurl them off the cliff. And that they would continue to have these dreams until they find someone who will tell them how to be saved. We get so obsessed by who has the power to appoint judges in this country when what we ought to be obsessed with is who has the power to pray for the judges after they are appointed. Lastly, I am praying that if the judges and lawyers approach any so-called Christian clergy persons who do not believe in hell and tell them about their dreams and visions that the unbelieving clergy persons will begin to have the same nightmares until they repent and believe in the gospel.
As you sense the leading of the One-who-must-be-obeyed-in-all-things, would you join me in this new adventure in prayer?
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